Sunday, September 9, 2012

Heaven as a Roof.

The poem I was once forced to memorize contains the line "He
first created for the children of men heaven as a roof..." Some have
recorded this line as "He first created the heavens as the highest roof for the
children of men..." I never really went beyond the phrase "heaven as a
roof," and much worse, in my mind the entire meaning of the verse slowly
and over time had become "heaven is a roof," accompanied by the odd expletive
that always accrue to memories of the detention room.

I was always quite happy to think of the Venerable Bede pottering
around writing his history. And I was always quite happy to think of him
as a man with a job in the clergy, rather than as some kind of religious nut
job. Then I find out he didn't even write the poem I was forced to memorize.
Someone called Caedmon dreamed it first before he wrote it, and after writing it,
he too became a 'zealous monk.' Bede did no more to the poem than
translate it from Anglo Saxon into Latin. It's these sorts of little
things that lead a person toward cynicism.